


the hanging tree

by sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Death, Execution, Gore, Hanging, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Involuntary Arousal, Mind Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-14 13:19:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11783976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: It’s Ripley that takes him to the tree, in the end. He can barely walk, at that point – body little more than an open wound, aching and ruined, torn apart under hertendercare – but he forces himself to do so, nonetheless. Forces himself to walk, slow but straight-backed, head held high and spine unbowed despite his stumbling, his trembling. He is ade Rolo, and a de Rolo he will stay until the end, proud and unbroken.Proud is a lie, unbroken a joke, but he keeps telling himself them nonetheless.(A canon divergence in which Cassandra doesn't manage to get Percy out in time, and the Briarwoods decide to tie up some loose ends.)





	the hanging tree

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings** for major character death, graphic depictions of death, execution by hanging, violence / gore, references to rape and torture, psychological manipulation, and post-mortem eye trauma.
> 
>  **Please read the tags and warnings carefully!** This fic is intended to be graphic and disturbing, so please, _please_ don't read it if it sounds like any of the things in it are going to upset or distress you.

It’s Ripley that takes him to the tree, in the end. He can barely walk, at that point – body little more than an open wound, aching and ruined, torn apart under her _tender_ care – but he forces himself to do so, nonetheless. Forces himself to walk, slow but straight-backed, head held high and spine unbowed despite his stumbling, his trembling. He is a _de Rolo_ , and a de Rolo he will stay until the end, proud and unbroken.

( _Proud_ is a lie, _unbroken_ a _joke_ , but he keeps telling himself them nonetheless.)

Still, he walks, chin up and gaze straight ahead. He refuses to be _carried_ to his own death.

Because that’s what this is, he knows. No one’s said as much – Ripley doesn’t talk to him, other than to mock him, to twist the scalpel she’s dragging across his skin deeper with her words – but it’s more than obvious. His father is dead, killed in the initial battle in the dining room. His mother is dead, killed in the cell next to him as he shook and cried and tried not to listen, to look. His siblings are dead, in a variety of ways so awful he can’t bear to try and recall them.

(Other than Cassandra, he thinks, clutching at the last thread of hope he has left. Cassandra wasn’t amongst the bodies of his family piled high in the cell next to his, as best he could tell given how broken and mutilated they were. He prays she’s safe, prays she got out alive and isn’t just decomposing in a different room.)

He’s one of their last loose ends to tie up – and if there’s anything he’s learned over the last week, it’s that the Briarwoods are nothing if not _ruthlessly_ efficient.

They’ve assembled a crowd for the show, too, he realises, with a sick lurch in his stomach and a stumble to his step as Ripley nudges him into the main square, and the people gathered there have to part to let them pass. The commoners keep their voices low and eyes downcast. It can’t have been much more than a week – he doesn’t _think_ it’s been much more than a week, please _god_ don’t let him have been down there for more than a week – but they seem different, already, dressed in greys and mourning blacks, faces drawn and eyes circled with sleepless bruises.

It pains him, to see his people suffering already under the heavy hand of the Briarwoods. At least, he supposes, he won’t have to see it for much longer.

Ahead of him, the Sun Tree has been specially decorated in preparation for the event – hung already, he realises, the nausea rising in his throat, with the corpses of his family. Or, rather, what’s left of them. Vesper, sweet Vesper, thrown from the top of the tallest tower… there’s not much left of her to hang, but they’ve managed it anyways, somehow, a knotted string of shattered limbs swinging in the wind.

Percy thinks, faintly, as Ripley nudges him into the empty space around the base of the tree and the smell of rotting flesh hits his nostrils, that he’s going to be sick. Right here, in front of all these people, all _his_ people, and the last thing they’re going to see of him is him dropping to his knees and retching emptily – because that’s his _family_ , god, those are his brothers, his sisters, his mother and father-

“Ah, _there_ you are.” Sylas Briarwood’s voice isn’t terribly familiar, but the deep rumble of it, resonating somewhere under Percy’s sternum, is unmistakeable. The broad weight of his hand curls around the back of Percy’s neck, squeezing ever so gently, and Percy’s nausea melts away into cold, empty terror. “So _glad_ you could make it, darling boy. Our little display just isn’t complete with you.”

“ _Why_ ,” manages Percy, throat tight and strangled, unable to tear his eyes away from the corpses in the tree. “Gods, _Pelor_ , why- why would you-” Even after everything Ripley’s done to him, after the blood and violation and pain, this… this is wrong. This is _wrong_ , so wrong it turns his stomach, makes his skin crawl.

Sylas just chuckles in reply, low and gentle. The sound carries over the silent, waiting crowd, uncomfortably loud in the packed square. “I can take it from here, Doctor Ripley, thank you. Feel free to stay and watch, though.” He hums, softly, amused by some private joke that Percy most certainly doesn’t get. “I’m sure you’re interested to see what your handiwork looks like as a piece of art on public display.”

“Of course,” says Ripley, but there’s irritation behind the words, clipped short and frustrated. She’d wanted to keep him longer, Percy knows – she’d told him as much, when she’d been wrist-deep in his guts that morning, scolding him for his snivelling sobs. But, in the end, she was in the Briarwoods’ employ, and therefore beholden to their whims.

She was, after all, smart enough to not argue with the somewhat unpredictable hand that fed her.

(“And besides, darling boy,” she’d said during their last few hours together, pulling her hands free with a wrenching, sucking noise, and licking absently at the blood down the side of one thumb, “I’m sure there’ll be others like you, at some point or another. Probably not as clever, or as delightfully _pretty_ , but I’ll just have to make do. And, well, in the meantime…” She’d hitched up her long, heavy woolen skirts with her crimson-slick fingers, and smiled as she’d straddled him on the operating table. “We can have one last round of fun, hmm?”)

When Sylas clicks his fingers and holds a hand out, though, she gives him over with little more than a faint scowl – shoves him in Sylas’ direction hard enough that he stumbles, nearly falls, tripping over his own half-numb feet.

Sylas catches him, with ease, fingers like bands of iron curling around the neck of his coat and the rag-shirt just barely covering the still-weeping lash marks over his back and chest. “There we go,” he murmurs quietly, all his attention on Percy, Anna forgotten as she slips back into the crowd. She blends in well with the mourners in her greys and browns and, though Sylas is a far more immediate threat, Percy can’t help but watch her with wide, white-rimmed eyes until she’s disappeared. “I’m sure you’re glad to be free of _her_ , hmm?”

Even if Percy had an answer for that, even if there’d been room for words through the horrified, exhausted sobs building in his throat, Sylas doesn’t give him the opportunity to reply. No sooner has he finished his sentence than he turns, hauling Percy along with him by an iron-tight hand around the upper arm, to the profane structure he’s built curling up around the Sun Tree.

A gallows, Percy realises, with bile rising in his throat, complete with a platform. And, at the very top, hanging from a wide branch and swinging ever so slightly in the bitter wind, a single noose.

The journey up the hastily-built, cobbled-together stairs can’t take more than a minute or two but, for Percy, it seems to take an age. He counts every gasp of his breath, every frantic heartbeat, every throb of pain through his body – counts them, and clutches them close, like precious things. They’ll be gone soon enough, he knows. He plans to treasure them, in the last few moments he has left, no matter how much they hurt.

When they reach the top of the gallows, stood together on a rickety platform of wooden planks with their hair and clothes being plucked at by a bitter winter wind, he’s not sure what he expects to happen. For Sylas to make some awful speech, perhaps, for the noose to be around his neck in moments and his execution over in a few more, for the crowds to start rioting. None of these things happen, though – the crowd is silent, some staring upwards at Percy where he’s stood high above them, some with their faces turned to their feet, children with their eyes covered by parents’ hands. Delilah, naturally, stands at the front of the crowd, staring raptly up at her husband with warm adoration in her eyes and her hand on the shoulder of a black-veiled figure at her side.

He tries to spot Ripley in the crowd, fails, and is unsure whether to feel grateful or not.

What he doesn’t expect, though, is gentle hands smoothing over his lacerated, bone-deep bruised shoulders. Doesn’t expect Sylas leaning in with an intimate, conspiratorial smile until his lips are almost brushing the shell of Percy’s ear.

“Don't you know, darling boy,” he whispers, voice low and warm and almost _comforting_ , “that it’s traditional to pay your executioner, before you hang? I’d hate for the last of the de Rolo line to die having disgraced themselves, you know.”

“…What else do you _want_?” rasps Percy, finally, voice shaking almost as much as he is. He's made bold by the knowledge of his own death, by the knowledge that there's nothing else they can do to him now, but his knees still want to buckle under the weight of Sylas’ hand, under the weight of the _kindness_ in his voice. “What else could you _possibly_ take from me- my house, my city, my family-” _My happiness, my body, my pride,_ he thinks, but doesn't say.

Sylas sighs, like he’s being dense, and moves one hand to cup the back of Percy’s neck with his palm. Though he moves slowly, almost gentle, approaching a wild faun, Percy flinches with a sharp, high whine of stress-noise, the whites of his eyes showing all the way round his dilated pupils.

Ripley does wonderful work, work Sylas deeply appreciates on a number of levels – but she can, he thinks, as Percy trembles harder beneath his touch, breathes so fast and shallow it’s almost panting, be… _overzealous_ , at times. “Come now,” he murmurs, tugging at the boy’s collar. The callouses of his fingers catch on scabs and raised scars littering the boy’s neck. “Doctor Ripley tells me you’re a bright young lad. _Surely_ you can think of _something_.”

Percy drags in a stuttering breath, and lets his eyes flutter closed. He’s wearing his coat, royal blue and bloodied, thrown tattered over the rags of the shirt and trousers they’d found for him to wear. He’d nearly cried when Ripley had put it on him, before he’d been dragged out before the waiting crowd – comforted somehow, obscurely, by the idea that he would die wearing the item of clothing that had become something close to a safety blanket to him.

He should have known that comfort would not be allowed to last.

Up on the platform, high above the crowd of watching, waiting Whitestone citizens, he exhales shakily and reaches up to undo the single button holding the coat closed across his chest. He doesn’t need to see Sylas’ expression to know how satisfied the man is, can feel his delight in the way the hand around his nape tightens.

“That’s it,” purrs Sylas, approvingly, as Percy lets the coat fall from around his shoulders, catches the fabric in his hands and holds it out to Sylas, eyes still closed. “There’s a good boy.” Sylas takes the coat, a boy’s piece of clothing in a man’s hands, and drapes it around his shoulders. The blood-dark, ragged fabric hangs around him like a mockery of a cloak, fluttering in the breeze.

Percy inhales, exhales, chokes on a sob.

When he opens his eyes, there’s the noose in front of him, pulled closer by one of Sylas’ hands just above the knot. A commoner’s death for him, the. No clean end at the sharp edge of an executioner’s axe, like his noble birth should allow him.

Instead, he’ll dangle like a petty thief, slow and undignified – the noose isn’t even silk, is instead a rough hemp-like cord. Somehow, he’s unsurprised the Briarwoods would take this last opportunity to humiliate him.

Sylas, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, smiles widely. “Well,” he says, nudging Percy forward a gentle half-foot, until Percy’s toes are hanging over the edge of the platform. “I suppose this is goodbye, then, dear boy.” He pulls the noose close enough to slip it over Percy’s head, tugging until the knot is tight against the side of his neck, the rope a light pressure already against the base of his throat. “It’s a shame, really. We had so _little_ time to get to know one another. From what Doctor Ripley tells me, you and I would have gotten on _marvellously_ , if only you’d given me a chance…”

It’s all Percy can do not to choke on the scream building in his chest. The tears he’d tried so hard to suppress before, the tears he hadn’t thought he was even _capable_ of shedding any more after seemingly endless nights spent howling and sobbing in his dark, filthy cell, begin beading at the corner of his eyes. He thinks, maybe, he should yell, fight, howl rebellion – but instead he simply stands there, meek and mild as a lamb lead to the abattoir, as Sylas pulls his wrists behind his back and binds them with the same rough cord as the noose.

When he is done, Percy is stood trussed for slaughter at the edge of the gallows, looking out at the tear-blurred outline of all of Whitestone below. He wants to say something – _I’m sorry_ , or, _keep fighting_ , or maybe, _just give in, it’s easier, it’s so much easier if you just give up_ – but the words die in his throat, fall rotting and foul on his tongue.

There’s nothing left in him, any more. No anger, no energy, no resistance. Just exhaustion, and fear, and _cold_.

“My _beloved_ citizens,” calls Sylas out over the waiting crowd, his voice unnaturally loud in the silence and stone. “We are gathered here today to witness the execution of the last scion of the de Rolo line. You may feel, perhaps, that the de Rolos have ruled you kindly. Perhaps even _well_. And who am I to tell you they have not? However, it is now, ah… time for a _change in leadership_ , shall we say.”

He smiles, wide and unfriendly, the oversharp points of his teeth gleaming in the moonlight, and gestures at the corpses already dangling bloodied and grotesque from the branches of the tree. “As you have no doubt noticed, the time of the de Rolos’ rule is over. _Most_ of you, our ever-gracious new citizens, have understood this. Accepted it, even. Tragically, Percival, the last of a dying era, has _not_. He has been unable to acknowledge that his family’s time has come and gone, has refused to cooperate with the new leadership… And, as a result, he has been charged with treason, and sentenced to hang by the neck until death.”

(There’d been no chance to refuse, thinks Percy, no offer of leniency for cooperation, _nothing._ Just the swift and brutal murder of his family and those guards that still remained loyal to them, and then Anna, and her dungeon, and her knives – he’s sure she’s still in the crowd, somewhere, _watching._ Waiting, a wolf amongst the sheep. _Hungry_ , and eager to see him choke.)

“To a new age,” says Sylas, quietly, his voice carrying like the backswing of an executioner’s axe across a town holding its collective breath, “of Briarwood rule.”

And suddenly, for Percival, the wooden planks beneath his feet are no longer there.

Percy’s seen hangings before. They’re rare, in Whitestone, or at least _were_ before the Briarwoods arrived. But there was always the occasional murderer or rapist, a few a year, who’d been condemned to hang. He’d always watched, when it’d happened – first from the castle balcony, stealthily, when his parents had considered him too young to attend, and then from the foot of the gallows with the rest of the family. There’d been the pronouncement by the executioner, the crowd silent with anticipation, the pause… Then the drop, the plummet down ten, twenty feet, and the abrupt _break_. The criminal’s neck snapping, brutal but _quick_ , a fall and then _nothing._

It had been a fast, clean death, even if their body was left strung up for the birds.

This, though. This is _nothing_ like that.

There’s no clean break, nothing fast about it. He falls, but only barely – a foot or so at most, nothing more. Enough to bruise, to hurt, not enough to snap. Instead, he’s left hanging there, his throat bruised by the drop and slowly crushed by the rope, wheezing in desperate breath after breath despite knowing there’s no use.

He’s going to die here, he _knows_ that. But his body doesn’t – legs kicking out helplessly at the air, wrists pulling against the rough rope binding them behind his back, mouth gaping, wide and fish-like, as he desperately tries to pull in enough air to fill lungs spasming with the _shock_ of it all.

He’s sure the crowd below is still watching, but he can’t see them. Hells, they might even be cheering, or rioting, for all he knows. He’s gone numb to the world. His vision’s patchy with red-black, his ears full of the rushing of his blood as his oxygen-starved heart tries desperately to continue pumping, his lungs fluttering in his chest as he drags in what tiny sips of air he can.

(Unseen by him, Sylas is still stood behind him on the wooden platform of the gallows, blue coat draped over his shoulders, _watching_ – silent, impassive, and with the slightest hint of a smile curling lips up from the glinting-white points of his fangs.)

It takes less than a minute for the oxygen deprivation to set in properly. His eyes roll half-up into his head as his lungs start to burn, bulging in their sockets, lips and tongue swelling and saliva dribbling out the corners of his mouth where he’s gasping uselessly for breath.

He’s still conscious enough to feel it when he pisses himself, humiliatingly. There’s nothing he can do about it – can’t even curl his fingers into fists, since they’re already locked in place there, muscles constricted tight with a combination of nerve pressure and disrupted blood flow. There’s even less he can do when he feels himself harden involuntarily, as blood pools in his lower body under the influence of gravity and a heart too weak to pump it properly any more.

If he had the capacity, he might be embarrassed with the way he’s disgracing himself in front of Whitestone, in his last moments. As it is, panic and _pain_ overwhelms the vicious humiliation of it all – and if he were conscious enough to follow a train of thought to its conclusion, he’d most likely be grateful for that particular small mercy.

There’s a ringing in his ears, strobing lights across his eyes in the place of the previous black spots, and he knows – somewhere, past the wildly roiling fog in his brain, thoughts flickering incomprehensibly and uselessly for a half-second before disappearing – that he’s got mere seconds of consciousness left, if that.

He can feel the purpling of his lips, hear the wet gurgling from his throat, see the way his right eyelid is slowly drooping down over his eye, despite his best attempts to keep it open. Through his flickering, blurring vision, he gazes out at the crowd, at his people, trying to fix them in his mind before everything goes dark. If he’s got to choose something to be the last thing he ever sees, he’s going to choose Whitestone, choose his city, choose the citizens that, he supposes, are technically _his_ to rule until his last breath. And, as his eyes flicker wildly across the crowd, red-pulsing darkness creeping in at the edges, his gaze catches on a familiar face amongst the throng.

The last thing he sees before his vision goes black, before his tongue lolls and the blood vessels in his left eye burst and his senses leave him, is the bright, _hungry_ joy in Anna Ripley’s eyes.

Percival de Rolo’s body stills, a minute or two after the drop. The crowd exhale relief, that it’s over, that they no longer have to watch the last of their city-state’s ancestral line dance in a noose- and then the body begins to jerk, convulse, as the hypoxia sets in. It’s a sickening sight, gruesome – a boy, not yet a man, strung up bloodied and humiliated and dying, left unconscious and swinging to slowly suffocate under his own weight.

Somewhere in the crowd, as Percy’s body twitches and jerks in the rope – face purple-red, tongue saliva-soaked and protruding, his piss-and-blood-soaked pant clinging to the throttled-hardness of his cock – someone sobs, once, and is silent.

The death of the last of the de Rolos is a protracted affair but, in the end, a quiet one. There is no dramatic tolling of bells, no wailing, no cries – Percy dies near-silently over the course of ten minutes or so, his cries throttled by the rough rope around his bruise-dark throat. There is no sound from the silent, watching crowd. Only the faintest of murmurs, whispers of subdued horror from among the onlookers, and the soft call of a raven from somewhere among the branches of the tree.

“There,” says Delilah, when Percy’s corpse finally stills. In the silence, her high voice carries clear and sharp across the waiting square, though she’s speaking only for the ears of the person next to her. “Isn’t that better, dear?”

She rests a comforting hand on the shoulder of the petite figure beside her, her long fingers carefully manicured and painted, encrusted with the recently-deceased de Rolo family’s jewels. “They’re all gone, now. Isn’t that better? …Oh, dear, there’s no need to cry! Shh, shh. Poor thing. Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay, now there’s nothing to distract you from your _new_ family. Shh, shh, that’s it. There, there.”

In the Sun Tree, with a rustle of wings, the still-calling raven emerges to begin its feast on Percival de Rolo’s blue, wide-open eyes. And, beneath the dark mourning veil draped over her face, held magically still and silent at Delilah’s side, Cassandra Briarwood begins to cry.

**Author's Note:**

> i’ve been working on this since november, actually, and i’ve only just around to finishing it (partially because some of the research required to write it was kinda grim). i started writing it partially as an experiment of sorts, and partially as a gift for someone. they know who they are - if you see this, i hope you like it.
> 
> come visit me @sparxwrites on tumblr to see (sometimes) slightly less depressing stuff, and significantly less character death.


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